Good news from Marsha’s Marshes; bad news for goat

Hold the phone! Things may be looking up. Either that or the smoke is getting to a Realtor who lives downstream from a blazing bosque marijuana patch.

After centuries of declining real estate prices around these parts (it has been a couple of hundred years at least, hasn’t it?), there may be the shimmer of a glimmer at the end of a long, long tunnel, at least according to the Wall Street Journal Online, which I don’t read, given my avoidance of anything that makes Rupert Murdoch another buck. A friend of mine in Texis, where they still have money (or at least act like it), reads Rupert’s rag, and sent me a link.

It sez here that the Goodbye Girl, who’s been trying for a several years to say bye-bye to her Baja Abiquiu property and herbal farm — endearingly referred to by some locals as Marsha’s Marshes — has raised, raised, I say, the asking price for her 247 acres and 6,500-square-foot house by more than 7%, from $6.9 million to $7.5 million.

But despite the escalator, it’s still a deall, dahlin’: According to an earlier WSJ story, Mason bought the property for $1.5 million in 1992, dubbed it the Double M Ranch (Marsha Mason, get it?), invested $10 million in improvements and development of the organic herbal farm, now a going business called Resting in the River. The property, when originally listed in 2007, had a price tag of $11.5 million. The asking price was lowered several times, reaching a low of $6.9 million.

And now the price is on the way back up. But you’ve still got time to get your checkbook out. Do not tarry.

A story has trickled down from southern Colorado that you probably missed …

Two guys are out hiking when they come upon a huge hole in the ground. They are amazed by its size and apparent depth.

“Wow,” says one, “that’s some hole; I can’t even see the bottom. I wonder how deep it is.”

“I don’t know,” says his buddy. “Let’s throw something down and listen to see how long it takes to hit bottom.”

The first hunter spies an old automobile transmission in the nearby brush. So they pick it up and carry it over to the hole, count one, and two and three, and throw it in.

They are standing there listening and looking over the edge when they hear a rustling in the brush behind them. As they turn around, a goat crashes out of the brush, runs up to the hole and, with absolutely no hesitation, jumps in head first.

While they are standing there looking first at each other, then into the hole trying to figure out what that was all about, an old farmer walks up. “Say there”, says the farmer, “you fellers didn’t happen to see my goat around here anywhere, did you?”

The first hunter says, “Funny you should ask, but we were just standing here a minute ago and a goat came running out of the bushes doin’ about a hundert miles an hour and jumped head first into this hole here!”

The old farmer scratched his head. “Why, I don’t know how he did that. I had him chained to a transmission!”

Wondering if they’ve hit bottom yet (the goat and the transmission, not the land prices), I’m outta here.